The Midnight Express

I recently had to venture to my doctors office to get shots for traveling overseas, which for most would be a normal experience.  Not me.  The story goes something like this:

Nurse comes in and gives me the shots & then the doctor starts to do the physical…

“Oh where are you going?” says my middle aged slightly tanned doctor.

“Ankara, Turkey.” I explain a bit about why I’m going and continue to awkwardly bullshit with him for a bit longer as I freeze half naked on the examining table. 

“Oh interesting…” I can see I’ve triggered some thought in his brain.  He pauses.  “Have you ever seen ‘A Midnight Express’?” he asks me. 

“Uh…no.” I say, a little unsure what this has to with our conversation I try to just listen because I start to feel a bit woozy from those shots.

“It’s a movie that takes place in Turkey when a guy is caught smuggling drugs into the country illegally and the movie is all about how horrible their prisons are in Turkey.”

My doctor decides to brief me on the detention facilities in Turkey, which is every travelers warmest thoughts before entering that country.  Geez… I wonder what their jails look like?  But he continues with his monologue on how terrible the conditions are just in case I was considering on doubling as a drug mule while being employed by the State Department.  And the best part about all this is, this guy thinks he’s funny! 

I wonder if he ever told this story during a prostate exam while prefacing, “turn your head and cough!” Now that joke would be a real winner.

“Don’t do drugs while you’re overseas in Turkey,” my doctor says chuckling to himself.  “Because those prisons are horrible… you should really watch the movie before you go; it’s a classic,” he adds. 

“Yeah, I’ve really got to kick those drug habits before I go overseas,” I say, throwing him a bone. 

I think he blinked twice but I couldn’t be sure.  His face was starting to look more like a Joan Rivers byproduct because he spent so much time at his new plastic surgery start-up practice and less and less time at his family practice and lets just say his face was starting to show the signs. 

The Doc didn’t know what to say.  He was hoping I was joking but he was trying to read my face to be sure. 

“Let’s go over your medical charts before you go,” says the Doc prevailing on the side on slight ambiguity as to whether I was a serious drug offender or not. 

I would have kept “stirring the pot” as my sister likes to phrase my shenanigans but at this point I was feeling quite uneasy from the shot and was more than satisfied with letting my family doctor of more than twenty years think that there was a possibility that I may be a drug mule, as long as I could go to Taco Bell after this ridiculous experience. 

But first, on my way out I had to do a quick fact check.  I pulled up IMDB on my iphone and apparently Joan was right, ‘The Midnight Express’ was a movie about detention facilities in Turkey… but it came out in 1978! How old did he think I was? 

Maybe next time I would see Doc at his other office…